CD диск Vivanco, Sebastian De - Cantara El Alma 1CD (0850869006916)

Salamanca Cathedral launches its new label with a sumptuous recording of sacred music by Spanish Renaissance composer Sebastián de Vivanco, to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the composer’s death in Salamanca in 1622. This is the first album on the Cathedralis label, which will be releasing further collections of Renaissance polyphony.

A priest as well as a composer, Vivanco was maestro di cappella of Salamanca Cathedral from 1602 until the end of his life. Musically, Vivanco may be considered to be on a par with the more celebrated Tomás Luis de Victoria, with whom he shares the birthplace of Ávila, but his music has not been as widely disseminated and deserves a larger audience. With this recording, the singers of Ensemble Plus Ultra and Schola Antiqua, instrumentalists of La Danserye, and artistic director David Martin, hope to go some way towards rectifying that imbalance by bringing Vivanco’s exquisite polyphony, which beautifully combines voices and early instruments, to more listeners than ever before. The recording has been coordinated by the musicologist and director of Ensemble Plus Ultra, Michael Noone, a great scholar of Vivanco and initiator of this endeavour.

Ensemble Plus Ultra is one of the most renowned early music vocal ensembles today, with a Gramophone Award for their boxed set of sacred works by Victoria. “One of the most enjoyable characteristics of Iberian choral music of this period is the askance perspective Victoria and his contemporaries had on the rules of polyphony ... But unless a choir embraces the music in that same spirit of insubordination, many of its rhythms, harmonies and audacious dissonances will pass by unnoticed. This is one of the great strengths of the Ensemble Plus Ultra, who embrace the performances of all these pieces with an enthusiastic sense of anything being possible. Ultimately, though, it is just deeply human and emotional music that they perform not only with great tenderness but so simply that one is struck every time – as if for the first time – by its crystalline, uncomplicated beauty.” - Gramophone on Ensemble Plus Ultra’s Victoria anthology.